An artist rendering depicts the five-story addition to Burge Residence Hall that will house 100 more students.

Burge Hall has long been one of the most popular residence halls on campus, and this year students have an extra incentive to request housing there for fall 2009: brand-new rooms with semiprivate bathrooms.

A five-story addition on the building’s northeast side will house 100 students in double rooms with shared bathrooms. Returning students will have first dibs on the new digs, with remaining space assigned to new students based on the date their housing application is received. In other words, don’t delay.

Construction on Burge—dubbed “the coolest and most convenient residence hall on campus” by a commenter on Wikimapia.org—began in 2007 and will be complete in January 2009, with rooms ready for fall 2009 occupancy. The addition’s first floor, says University Housing director Von Stange, will be allocated for administrative offices, making them more accessible and easily identifiable than they had been in the building’s basement.

With 829 students currently calling it home, Burge is the second largest of the University’s 10 halls. Parents with UI history, Stange notes, may have memories of an excessive party scene at Burge, which was built in 1957, but he insists the hall has outgrown the notorious reputation it acquired in the 1980s and is in high demand for other reasons.

“Burge is a large hall with a recently renovated dining area and lots of doubles with air-conditioning. Plus, it has a great location just a few blocks north of the Pentacrest,” Stange explains. “We wanted to fulfill student requests to live on the east side and were looking for additional space, so this project will help us accommodate those requests.”

The new rooms are more contemporary in design and are good-sized, Stange adds, with closets outfitted with wire shelves. Also, each room will have its own thermostat to control heating and cooling.

Rohit Vuppuluri, a junior from Peoria, Ill., majoring in biomedical engineering, currently lives in Burge’s Men in Engineering Living-Learning Community. After spending his first year at Iowa in Burge, he served as a resident assistant in Currier Hall as a sophomore. He says he is glad to be back in Burge.

“Currier was a nice and quiet hall, but I wanted to have more first-year students on my floor,” he says. “Burge houses a very diverse group of students, including a lot of first-year students, and there is great energy here throughout the year.”

Although enticed by the new rooms in Burge, Vuppuluri says his priority is to stick with the Men in Engineering community next year.